Archive for October, 2006

Today Andrewtech Automotive signed on to be the official support shop of Butt Dyno Racing. We’re pretty thrilled – it should be a good partnership for both parties.

Andrew Yates used to work at Hillmuth Automotive in Gaithersburg. Fatih at SELGP had recommended him. His work was awesome, but more important, he was an amazingly nice and honest guy who really worked with his customers to make them as happy as they could be. As word of mouth spread and demand for his skills grew, he started his own shop, Andrewtech Automotive. Since then he and his staff have worked on some amazing cars as Andrewtech has taken off.

Andrewtech specializes in Subarus (especially transmissions) but they have done anything you can think of to a Subaru (including engine swaps) and work on other cars, Hondas, Evos, etc etc. Most relevant for autocrossers and track whores: they also do great alignments (John’s insane -3.7/-2.1 is still going strong after two seasons of autocross – well over 30 events and 20K miles) and they have scales for cornerbalancing. Most importantly they are one of the nicest, straight-up shops we have ever dealt with. It’s INCREDIBLY rare for a shop to build up the level of trust that Andrewtech Automotive has.

We are looking forward to working with them in the 2007 season and beyond.

John, being a huge fan of GRM and having an extra couple of GRM magnets thanks to the fine people at NASA, wanted to take a crack at getting into the Letters section. So when he went to Germany to drive on the Nurburgring in a race-prepped 325i from Theo at rent-racecar.de he took the magnets with him for the photo op (and, of course, to intimidate everyone else on the Nordschleife with the power of GRM).

After getting back to the States, John emailed the picture to David Wallens, the editorial director of GRM. His response:

That’s pretty cool. Do we have permission to use that photo? David

John submitted the picture of the car with the GRM sticker, along with a brief writeup of the trip.

On newststands today!

The writeup ended up in the November issue of GRM, pictured above. It’s on page 35. Thanks to GRM for printing it, Jared for riding along (and helping with traffic), and Shannon for taking the picture. And of course my fiancee Gaynne for putting up with me. Finally, thanks to Friction for keeping me off of the guardrail when I spun. Much apologizing to Kevin Shivers, who was also with us. I did not give him a “not pictured is…” credit in the article. But here he is on the left, with Walter Röhrl (whose name I mis-spelled in the letter):